Obama had already been informed the leak would take weeks and weeks to fix, and it was better, I guess, to let it leak and destroy the coastlines if doing so would keep the story underreported and thus merely environmentally disastrous, but not politically disastrous.

Better to pretend there's not a problem, and let the problem destroy the Gulf, than to admit the problem and take action about it, which draws attention to it.

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,'” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

“We’re coming to this fight very late,” said Costner. “I think everybody would recognize that....”

“If we want to discuss the ‘what ifs’ looking back, I think you could fill in the blanks of understanding if these machines were already deployed, what we would be looking at,” said Costner. “I could scale this out for you and we would be chasing this oil out at the derrick itself. We couldn’t do anything about the size of the leak but we would be chasing that and we would be keeping that offshore.”